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For the past week Peter Dutton has repeatedly lied about funding cuts to border protection, with some experts warning his rhetoric has created a pull factor for people smugglers. By Mike Seccombe.
No, Peter, there is not a flotilla of boats coming
Over and over, as he sought to blame the Albanese government for the arrival of a small boat of asylum seekers in Western Australia last week, Peter Dutton made the same claim.
“They’ve ripped a cumulative $600 million out of Operation Sovereign Borders and Border Force,” the opposition leader announced.
But this wasn’t true. In fact, the opposite was the case.
Far from “ripping” $600 million out of border enforcement, the Albanese government has spent, or has budgeted to spend, $470 million more than the Coalition projected in its last budget before losing office. Dutton was well over a billion dollars’ worth of wrong.
Of course, it took a little time for serious media to parse the budget papers and establish the real numbers, and for the head of the Australian Border Force, Michael Outram, to release a statement addressing the opposition leader’s claim.
It was about 6pm on Monday when Outram’s statement dropped, and it debunked Dutton comprehensively.
“Border Force funding is currently the highest it’s been since its establishment in 2015, and in the last year the ABF has received additional funding totalling hundreds of millions of dollars, to support maritime and land-based operations,” he said.
By then, however, the falsehood had several days’ head start, as the opposition leader and his proxies spread it through every channel they could, focusing on the credulous presenters on morning television and right-wing radio.
The opposition leader made other claims as well.
Operation Sovereign Borders, he suggested in several interviews, was undermined by the Albanese government’s decision last February to abolish the temporary protection visa regime that had previously operated.
On the Nine Network’s Today show, he said: “The fact is that the temporary protection visa is a very important part of telling … [asylum seekers] that they won’t get a permanent outcome. Yet under this government they can.”
Speaking to Ben Fordham on Radio 2GB, he said: “Mr Albanese scrapped [TPVs], and he can’t say that Operation Sovereign Borders operates now as it did under the Coalition government.”
These claims are also untrue. Australia’s border security regime, for better or worse, operates exactly as it did under the Coalition. The changes Labor made to TPVs are irrelevant to the working of Operation Sovereign Borders or to the treatment of the asylum seekers who arrived in Western Australia last week, and who were promptly sent to offshore detention in Nauru.
“It remains impossible to reach Australia by boat and then seek asylum here,” says Daniel Ghezelbash, deputy director of UNSW Sydney’s Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law. “Anyone attempting to do so is turned back to their country of departure or sent to Nauru. That policy is entirely unchanged.”
The visa change, he says, allowed a limited cohort of people who had arrived in Australia more than 10 years ago, who had been found to be genuine refugees but were “stuck on a cycle of short-term protection visas, year after year”, to apply for a permanent protection visa.
“Those people had been living in Australia since before Operation Sovereign Borders went into effect. For anyone who arrived after January 1, 2014 – or who arrives now – the TPV policy change is entirely irrelevant,” says Ghezelbash. “It does not apply.”
On the basis of his untrue assertions about funding and visas, Dutton claimed Labor and Albanese were “weak” on border security, that people smugglers would see this weakness as a “green light” to send more asylum seekers, and “we’ll end up with an armada of boats”.
The opposition leader also advanced as further evidence of the government’s “weakness” the release of 149 people formerly held in immigration detention, pursuant to a High Court decision last November.
Clearly Dutton sees border security as a vote-winner for him.
Ahead of the Dunkley byelection, to be held on March 2, the Liberal-aligned campaigning organisation Advance is running hard on the asylum-seeker issue across both social and mainstream media.
“Albo, you unlocked the doors of immigration detention and let loose 149 criminals,” reads one of Advance’s newspaper ads. “How many in Dunkley? We demand you tell us before March 2.”
The strapline on the ad is “Rapists, paedophiles and murderers.” It also claims Anthony Albanese “paid for lawyers to argue for their release”.
Dutton denies accusations he – and his supporters – are playing politics with border security. All evidence, however, points to the contrary.
A number of immigration experts have warned that Dutton’s claims could increase boat arrivals, with the idea Australia’s borders have become porous under Labor becoming a pull factor.
The most damning – because it came from an apolitical government servant – was a statement issued by the commander of the Operation Sovereign Borders Joint Agency Task Force, Rear Admiral Brett Sonter, dismissing Dutton’s claims that Australia’s border security had been weakened by any policy change.
“The mission of Operation Sovereign Borders remains the same today as it was when it was established in 2013,” he said.
“Any alternate narrative will be exploited by criminal people smugglers to deceive potential irregular immigrants and convince them to risk their lives and travel to Australia by boat.”
That statement came out last Friday, but Dutton kept spreading his untruths. In so doing, Albanese told reporters in Nowra on Sunday, Dutton was showing “he’s not interested in outcomes or in the Australian national interest”.
Dutton was minister for immigration and border protection and/or minister for home affairs in the previous government, from December 2014 to March 2021.
His record in that time is not good, as Abul Rizvi, a former deputy secretary of the Department of Immigration, points out. Dutton’s tenure coincided with an influx of asylum seekers that dwarfs any under Labor.
“In total, there were between 100,000 and 120,000 asylum applications lodged while Dutton was in charge. The is by far the largest number of asylum applications under any immigration minister in our history,” wrote Rizvi in a piece for John Menadue’s public policy journal, Pearls and Irritations, this week.
There were three key differences between those asylum seekers and the ones Dutton now focuses on: they came by air, they overwhelmingly had no legitimate claim to protection and they were not shunted into offshore detention.
They came as part of a “labour trafficking scam”, first from Malaysia and then China.
“The real issue from a border protection perspective is not the tiny number of boat arrivals but the fact we now have almost 110,000 asylum seekers living in Australia with little to no chance of being recognised as refugees,” Rizvi wrote.
Then there was the mishandling of contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars to manage the detention centres on Manus Island and Nauru – including a reported $80 million paid to support asylum seekers sent to Papua New Guinea, which still cannot be accounted for by the Department of Home Affairs.
A review of integrity and governance in regional processing contracts, conducted by Dennis Richardson, former head of both the Department of Defence and the Department of Foreign Affairs, and a former director-general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, or ASIO, was damning of departmental processes, which in some cases awarded contracts to companies with suspected links to drug and weapons smuggling, money laundering and other criminality.
The review found Dutton played no role in the procurements and it did not hold him, then Home Affairs secretary Michael Pezzullo, or anyone else, responsible.
The Richardson review and others over the years attest to a long history of departmental dysfunction under Dutton’s watch, but the concept of ministerial responsibility, inherited from the Westminster system, never applied. The buck stopped nowhere.
This is relevant to one thing Dutton said this week that was true: the fact a boatful of asylum seekers managed to make it all the way to the Australian mainland “tells you that the surveillance … is not there”.
The numbers bear out his criticism. In 2022-23, the number of surveillance flights was down more than 14 per cent, or 2100 flying hours, on the previous year.
This change had nothing to do with the specious funding cuts Dutton was talking about this week. It was due, in the words of Labor MP Julian Hill, chair of the parliament’s Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit (JCPAA), to the fact the surveillance of the nation’s maritime boundaries is being conducted by “flying old Corollas with a new paint job”.
The short version of a very long story is that in March 2006, a previous Coalition government entered into a $1.187 billion deal with a private operator to provide maritime surveillance, with 10 Dash–8 aircraft. The contract was due to end in 2019 but was extended multiple times and eventually grew in cost to $2.6 billion.
A damning audit report in 2021 found the contract had “not been effective”, and the contracted company had failed to deliver the “quantum and range” of services it should have. Despite this, the Department of Home Affairs extended the contract for another six years, to the end of 2027.
In February last year, the JCPAA asked Mike Pezzullo in to explain why Australia’s borders were being protected by old aircraft, using outdated technology, that could not fly at night, that were often short of air crew, and why, despite the failings of the contractor over 15 years, the department had never put the contract out for competitive tender.
The questioning grew very willing, as both Hill and former Liberal defence minister Linda Reynolds probed Pezzullo over his department’s record. Half of all contracts in the department, it heard, were entered without competitive tender.
When the JCPAA produced its report in August last year, it demanded the department report every six months on “progress in tendering and procuring a new surveillance services contract, given that it will have been 21 years since the contract was competitively procured if it runs to its current expiry date”.
A few months after that Pezzullo was sacked, following revelations he had attempted to involve himself in partisan politics, in contravention of the rule that public servants should be above such things.
In its first report back, the department said: “Within the constrained funding and specialist skillset environment, the Department has undertaken capability planning and development work ahead of its procurement for the new … contract, which is underway.”
Which is to say, not much progress had been made. Not much had changed in the view of Julian Hill, despite Pezzullo’s ousting.
He suggests responsibility for the manifest failures of the department goes higher than the departmental secretary.
“Indeed, secretaries are accountable for day-to-day administrative decisions. However, this was a pattern which was known to the former government for years, and they did nothing about it. There was a pattern of massive variations, a lack of competitive process of multibillion-dollar contracts. This is not the trivia that gets done way down in the department. These are really critical, multibillion-dollar contracts, critical to national security.
“There was a pattern of gross maladministration under Dutton and Scott Morrison. We saw it with the contracts for offshore processing and the multiple audits and inquiries into that. We saw it with these surveillance planes. It was a pattern … of big talk publicly and chest beating, but when you looked under the hood, it just didn’t work.”
Hill is a Labor MP, but the audit office is a nonpartisan body. The JCPAA is a bipartisan committee. Michael Outram and Rear Admiral Sonter are not politically aligned.
They all, in their various pronouncements this week, made the same point: Peter Dutton has not made Australia’s borders more secure.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on February 24, 2024 as "No, Peter, there is not a f lotilla of boats coming".
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